Someone Somewhere designated 2011 as the International Year of Forests, and to me it doesn’t matter who. What is interesting is the attempt at expanding general awareness through their campaign of presenting trees and forests with regards towards our complete interdependence with them. The seven and a half minute film produced to introduce the subject and invite a deeper awareness is simply gorgeous.

GoodPlanet.org has also created an elegant website offering a greater depth of information to follow up with, including a series of free posters for schools that are of the same highest quality as the film. There are numerous resources to be found here, and a photography contest to boot.

When all is said and done, so much focus on forests makes me want to go take a walk in one. See ya!

What a wonderful project! It is just this kind of creative exuberance in the name of nurturing mindfulness regarding our home that gives me more hope than anything else. So, are You going to add to the mosaic?

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This is being offered as a facet of The Harmony Movie, through which Prince Charles shares his unique perspective on our times.

Albert Einstein once stated that we can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used to create them. If we throw in another gem from him that “Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be achieved by understanding”, then we are well on our way to addressing an essential ingredient in any recipe for sustainable, conscious growth and development, and that is the nature of our fundamental relationship with ourselves.

This train of thought also makes me want to invoke one of my favorite Thomas Berry statements that we will only achieve peace with each other once we have established (an understanding that brings) peace with the earth. All of these thoughts seem to point in the general direction of not continuing to have complete faith that our technologies will solve all of our problems and get us out of the mess that we are in, but that we have to take a complete step back from our current course and learn how to imagine new kinds of beneficial relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world that we live in. After all isn’t that what spirituality should be all about?

There are a growing number of visionaries who are exploring this train of thought in increasingly integral and beautiful ways, and who have fully taken to heart the implications of developing a world-view that is thoroughly aligned with an evolutionary perspective and all that it implies. It is an exciting and vital conversation developing at the forefront of awakening communities, and fortunately for us, there is a growing collection of recently recorded dialogues exploring just what this means and how we might implement these insights in our daily lives. And best of all, access to these audio archives is free, which I hope is in the best spirit of encouraging the “we are all in this together” realization. After all, it is precisely when we are in service to each other that we begin to embody this emerging community consciousness a la Thomas Berry and his quest to establish mutually enhancing relationships.

There are three efforts along these lines that I would like to put forward as beneficial and inspiring contributions to this ongoing awakening, and I have been interacting with them and can vouch for their authenticity (and the fact that they are indeed free without any strings and the utmost of respect for your privacy). I should also make note for the record that I do not have any affiliation with any of these organizations and am putting these out there because I have experienced them as genuinely inspiring.

And the third, “Women on the Edge of Evolution” with 21 of the world’s leading spiritual luminaries, thinkers, artists, and agents for positive change.

I sincerely hope that you find inspiration and insight within some or all of these offerings, and that choosing to walk through this doorway will bring us closer to healing the deep divide between our hearts and our minds.
Always Love,
Eric

The greatest single need at present is the completion of the story, as told in its physical dimensions by science, by the more integral account that includes the numinous and consciousness dimensions of the emergent universe from its primordial moment. Once that is done, a meaningful universe, a functional cosmology, is available as a foundation for the total range of human activities in the ecological age. ~ Thomas Berry